


Hey, Jerkbutt

by ladderax (allnuthatchforest)



Series: Trapper Keeper Series [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Childhood, Childhood Friends, Friendship, Gen, shameless nineties nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-10 02:20:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allnuthatchforest/pseuds/ladderax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To everyone else, Eames is the charming new kid from England. But to Arthur, Eames is a bully, a budding criminal, and the bane of Arthur's existence. Especially after he steals Arthur's beloved Trapper Keeper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hey, Jerkbutt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [immoral_crow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/immoral_crow/gifts).



> Written in summer of 2011 as a gift for immoral_crow.

When Arthur came back from the bathroom something was very wrong. 

His coat was still on the back of his chair, his backpack was on the floor, and his Star Wars pencil case and lunchbox were still on the desk. But his Trapper Keeper was gone. 

Arthur loved his Trapper Keeper. He loved it more than almost anything except karate, computers, Nutty Buddy bars, Rambo III, and getting to sit in the front seat on the way to school. It had a design on the front that looked kind of like a big computer-generated spaceship made of ice surrounded by angry red triangles, and whenever he wanted to do something secret or put his head down on his desk he could prop it up and put a folder on top of it and make his own little cubicle, like the kind they had in the library. And now some butthead had taken it. 

"Did you take my Trapper Keeper?" he asked Dom. Dom was hunched over what looked like the math ditto, gripping his pencil in his fist, but he wasn't filling in the multiplication tables. He was drawing buildings again.

Dom could draw in 3-D, and Arthur was jealous. He'd asked Dom to teach him to draw a cube, but it looked funny when Arthur did it, and he always ended up erasing a hole through the page. 

"You're not allowed to draw on the homework," Arthur whispered. "Mrs. Blum's gonna yell at you in front of everyone. Again." 

"Shut up, Arthur," Dom sighed. "I don't care."

Arthur snatched the page away from Dom. He'd drawn a floating city with flying trains and skateboard ramps connecting all the buildings, and it was pretty cool.

"Can I have this? This is kind of neat," Arthur asked. 

"No, Arthur, it's my homework!" Dom cried. "Gimme it!" He swiped for the paper, but Arthur was quick, and he managed to keep it just out of Dom's reach. 

"Not unless you tell me what happened to my Trapper Keeper." 

Dom rolled his eyes. "I don't know. I wasn't paying attention. But it was probably Eames. He steals all kinds of stuff. He stole Yusuf's calculator the other day, and he definitely stole Mal's New Kids on the Block collage. She worked so hard on that!"

"No, Dom, you stole Mal's New Kids collage. I saw you hide it your cubby. You can't stand that she likes Donnie Wahlberg better than she likes you," Arthur jeered.

"I did not. Anyway, my mom says Eames is a bored rich kid and he steals stuff 'cause he wants attention." 

Arthur's cheeks were beginning to burn.

"What are you gonna do, Arthur?" Dom asked. "We're not even supposed to be in here during recess, so you can't tell a teacher or we'll get in trouble."

"I'm gonna fuck him up," he muttered. "I'm gonna fuck him up so bad." He kicked his backpack, imagining it was Eames' face. 

"You said the F-word," Dom stared at him in open admiration.

"Yeah? So what. Fuck fuck fuck. Shit. Bitch. Piss. Fuck." Arthur tugged his collar defiantly and stomped down the hall to find Eames.

-

Arthur thought that Dom's mom had to be wrong about Eames. Plenty of people paid attention to him. For starters, he made everyone but the teachers call him by his last name, like a grown-up in an action movie. He was one of the biggest and strongest kids in the class, and he always stood in the back for class pictures. He'd only been at Berry Hill Elementary since this October, and he came from England, so kids and teachers were always asking him questions about where he grew up, and he got to give a special presentation--the teachers had even gotten an overhead projector, so his talk about England was accompanied by pictures of cathedrals and roads and supermarkets that looked just slightly different than the ones they had on Long Island.

Arthur would have been bored by all of it, except that Eames was good at talking, and at one point he told a story about little boy princes getting their heads chopped off at the Tower of London and it made a couple of kids start crying. The story hadn't been part of the script, and the teacher, horrified, had said "Jonathan, that's quite enough now." 

"It's OK though," Eames said, baring his mischievous, crooked grin. "They're fine and happy now. They get to play ball and Nintendo and everything. It's just that they're ghosts. And yeah, sometimes they go into people's mouths when they yawn, and then they can play with your guts and chop your brain into tiny pieces." 

The crying kids cried harder. Arthur was impressed. 

Unfortunately, Arthur's attempts to be friends with Eames had come to nothing. For awhile he'd sat next to Eames at lunch, hoping Eames would talk to him, but he never did. The closest Eames came to communicating with Arthur was dropping peas down the back of his shirt and then pretending not to know anything about it. 

One day, as a last-ditch effort, Arthur had walked away to throw out the trash from his lunch, and he'd left one of his Nutty Buddy bars in its wrapper sitting right in front of Eames. Arthur loved Nutty Buddies, and leaving one uneaten was an act akin to throwing a birthday present in the trash still-wrapped or letting somebody else play Ryu in Street Fighter even when Arthur had won the thumb wrestling match fair and square. He'd hoped that Eames would take it as a sign that Arthur wanted to be friends. But he hadn't even mentioned it. It was pretty obvious to Arthur by now that Eames was just an asshole, and that he should probably just live full-time at the guidance counselor's office and save everybody else the trouble of having to deal with him.

Arthur could hear the sound of squeaks on the slippery tile, and he knew that everyone was coming back from recess. It probably would've been a good idea to join them and pretend he was coming from the playground like everyone else, but he was on a mission. He had to find Eames and make him pay. 

"Looking for someone?" Arthur turned around and there was Eames, in his Donatello sweatshirt. His arms were crossed and he was smirking, tapping his fingers on his elbow. 

"Donatello's my favorite," Arthur snarled, fuming. "You're not allowed to like him, you son of a piss."

"Son of a piss?" Eames laughed. "That's not even a word."

"No, it's four words," Arthur retorted. "What did you do with my Trapper Keeper?" 

"I didn't touch your Trapper Keeper," he shrugged. "Cobb probably took it. He's more of a klepto than I am." 

Arthur wrinkled his nose, confused. "What's a klepto?"

"I don't know. Something my mum calls me when she's crying." 

"I don't believe you, Eames," Arthur said, sticking his finger in Eames' face. "I will get to the bottom of this." 

"Jonathan! Arthur! Time for the spelling test!" Mrs. Blum shouted from the door. "Don't make me call your mother again, Jonathan!" 

Eames chuckled and turned back to Arthur. "I'm so scared. You're making me wet my pants, _darling_."

Eames had happened to witness Arthur's mother bringing his math book to school, and to Arthur's eternal embarrassment she'd stopped by his desk, given him a big, wet kiss, and said "Good luck on the test, darling." Now Eames called him "darling" every chance he got, and it made Arthur so mad he just wanted to kick Eames in the shin. 

This time he actually did it.

"Aw shit!" Eames yelled, crumpling to the ground and grabbing his ankle. The few stragglers in the hall turned to stare, totally transfixed, and a couple of their classmates peeped around the door. 

Mrs. Blum strode angrily out of the room, her long skirt making a loud whooshing sound. "That's it. After the spelling test, you two are going to the guidance counselor." 

"But Mrs. Blum," Eames pleaded, "he didn't do anything. I tripped." 

"Oh, that's a likely story," she huffed.

"But Mrs Blum! He's Arthur! He never does anything wrong." 

"Well, someone did something wrong," she said, offering her hand to help Eames up. "At the very least, you need to learn to watch your language."

-

"Boys, wait here for one moment," the guidance counselor instructed them. "The principal needs me." 

"Thanks for covering for me," Arthur whispered after she'd closed the door. "But you still need to give me my Trapper Keeper back.

"I told you, I don't have it," Eames replied, swinging his feet back and forth in the chair. 

Arthur shook his head. "Dom said he saw you."

"Dom still wears Velcro sneakers. You think he knows what's going on?" 

"Hey, jerkbutt," Arthur snapped. "Dom's my friend, and he's really smart. People even say he's a genius. And I think your sneakers are stupid. I read something in a magazine that said that that the pump doesn't really make you a better basketball player anyway."

"You're just jealous 'cause your parents probably can't afford them."

Without even thinking, Arthur grabbed a bottle from the low shelf just above their heads. He twisted it open it and dumped its contents, which turned out to be multicolored glitter, all over Eames. Eames bolted from his chair, bumping his head on the shelf. He looked like a cornered ferret. He swung at Arthur, who was quick enough to evade him; then Eames lunged for his collar, and his movement freed a wave of glitter, which landed in Arthur's hair and on his skin and threatened to get into his eyes if he didn't squeeze them shut. 

The guidance counselor chose to open the door at that very moment, and her startled expression would've been hilarious if it didn't so surely mean that Arthur was going to lose his Game Boy for at least the next month.

"He's a really mean person," Arthur shouted, prying Eames' fingers from his collar. "He makes fun of people and starts fights. And he stole my Trapper Keeper. You should get his parents to pay more attention to him so he doesn't act like this." 

"He's got a real violence problem," Eames muttered. 

"You're both in a whole lot of trouble," the guidance counselor said disapprovingly, stepping over a pile of glitter to take her seat. 

-

The principal's search of Eames' belongings proved that he was not, in fact, in possession of the Trapper Keeper. 

"Sorry I said you stole it," Arthur said to him the next morning, when they were peeling off their winter clothes and dropping their books off at their cubbies. 

"I did steal it," Eames replied casually. "Come here." He beckoned Arthur to come closer.

Arthur leaned in and watched as Eames wiggled the fiberboard at the back of the cubby. It moved aside, and a number of small objects clanked onto the wood--they sounded metallic, like keys or watches. Eames clicked on the tiny flashlight that was attached to the keychain of his backpack, and Arthur could see the unmistakable plastic sheen and geometric design of his beloved Trapper Keeper.

"I can't believe this!" he cried. Eames shushed him and reached into his secret compartment, rummaging around for something.

"Want a Nutty Buddy? I know you love those. I'm sure I've got one somewhere in here....ah, hell..." 

"No, seriously. Eames, you get off scot free and I get in all that trouble for fighting? That's just not fair," he grumbled, looking dejectedly at the floor. "I won't be able to go on the zoo field trip now, because of you. There's no way my mom's gonna sign the permission slip now." 

Eames stopped halfway through unzipping his puffy jacket. 

"Oh, you can still go on the field trip," he said wickedly. 

Arthur glared at him in disbelief. "How?"

A slow smile crept onto Eames' face. "Got a pen?"


End file.
